Padel Has Finally Learned What Luxury Means: Encourt

There is something rather strange about watching a sport you have fallen in love with become a phenomenon. When I first started playing padel seriously, it still felt like a secret that Britain had only just discovered. You could walk into a club and there was a genuine sense that everyone there was part of something new; people were figuring out the game together, discovering the peculiarities of the walls, the strange little tactical battles that emerge between four players on a court barely a third of the size of a tennis court, and the curious social alchemy that makes padel so addictive. I was, of course, particularly susceptible to it. Having grown up playing competitive junior tennis before leaving racket sports behind for more than a decade, I had initially approached padel as another sport to understand, but somewhere between the first few matches and the increasingly obsessive search for the right racket, shoes and coaching, it became something much more personal. I wanted to know how good I could become.

That curiosity has taken me through a rather large number of padel clubs. I have played in beautiful places, functional places, enormous places and places where the court itself was excellent but everything around it felt as though it had been added as an afterthought. Increasingly, however, I found myself becoming interested in something that had very little to do with the technicalities of the game: why did some clubs make me want to stay, while others made me want to leave the moment my ninety minutes were over?

The question has become particularly relevant because British padel is growing at a speed that would have been almost impossible to imagine only a few years ago. In 2019, when the LTA took responsibility for the sport, Britain had just 68 padel courts. By the end of 2025, there were 1,553 courts across 559 venues and 860,000 adults and juniors had played the sport during the year. Then, during 2026, participation passed the extraordinary milestone of one million players, with the country now home to 1,825 courts across 551 venues.

The numbers are difficult to comprehend until you put them into context. Participation has moved from roughly 15,000 people in 2019 to 129,000 in 2023, 400,000 in 2024, 860,000 in 2025 and more than a million today. The LTA's own 2024–29 padel strategy had originally set a target of reaching 400,000 annual players and 1,000 courts by the end of 2026; Britain has effectively blown through both targets years ahead of schedule.

When a sport grows this quickly, the first generation of infrastructure inevitably concentrates on one question: how do we get more people onto courts? The next generation has to ask something considerably more interesting: once they are there, what do we want the experience to feel like?

That is where I think Encourt enters the story.

I have known Aman (one of the founders) for some time, and our friendship has inevitably crossed paths with my increasingly obsessive relationship with padel. When he began talking about Encourt, I remember being intrigued by the ambition, but I also had the same reservation I have whenever somebody describes something as "luxury". The word has been used so extensively in hospitality, fashion, property, fitness and now sport that it has almost lost its meaning. A club can have expensive furniture, beautiful branding and a membership price to match, but none of those things necessarily make an experience luxurious. In fact, some of the most expensive places I have visited have been surprisingly ordinary once you get past the reception desk.

So when Aman began telling me about what they were building, I was interested, but I was waiting to see whether the reality would match the ambition.

Then I walked into Encourt.

What struck me first was not the gym, the spa or even the courts themselves, but the feeling that the whole place had been conceived as one environment rather than as a collection of facilities. The seven panoramic indoor courts sit beneath a palette of terracotta red and Wimbledon green, colours that immediately evoke two of the great temples of racket sport and give the space an almost theatrical quality. The decision is deceptively simple, but it changes the way the courts feel; they are not merely surfaces on which a booking takes place, but part of a visual identity that makes the entire club feel like a destination. Encourt describes itself as a padel and wellness club built around performance, recovery and community, and, unusually, the physical space actually seems to follow that philosophy rather than simply repeat it in marketing language.

At the centre of that experience is Bobo & Wild, and I think this is one of the details that reveals how differently Encourt has approached the idea of a padel club. In many facilities, food and drink exist at the periphery of the experience: somewhere to grab a coffee before your court or perhaps sit for ten minutes afterwards. At Encourt, the restaurant and social space feel much more integrated into the rhythm of the club. You play, you finish, you sit down, you talk about the match, you watch somebody else play, you have a coffee or something to eat, and suddenly the booking that was supposed to last an hour and a half has become an afternoon.

That distinction matters because padel has never really been just a sport. Its extraordinary rise has been driven partly by the fact that it is unusually easy to pick up and unusually social, with four people sharing a relatively intimate court and the game naturally creating conversation, partnership and competition. The LTA's latest figures show that around two-thirds of Britain's one million padel players also participate in tennis, which says something interesting about the relationship between the two sports: padel is not simply replacing the racket sports that came before it, but creating a new entry point into them.

If the court is where the game happens, then, the club is where the culture happens.

This is why the details at Encourt became so noticeable to me. There is nothing revolutionary about putting towels beside a court, yet when the towel is already there, neatly placed alongside your water, you notice the difference immediately. The same is true of cleanliness, something so mundane that it rarely gets mentioned in a review but which becomes almost impossible to ignore when it is missing. You notice the tired changing room, the neglected shower, the equipment that has seen better days, the bin that should have been emptied an hour ago. Conversely, when everything is immaculate and considered, you barely notice any of it at all; you simply feel that the place is functioning around you.

That, increasingly, is my definition of luxury.

Luxury is not really about the presence of expensive things. It is about the absence of unnecessary thought.

The best hotels understand this instinctively. You don't remember the exact specifications of the mattress or the amount of money spent on the marble in the bathroom; you remember that the room was ready when you arrived, that somebody anticipated what you needed, that the coffee appeared without you having to ask, or that you were able to spend an entire afternoon somewhere without ever feeling hurried. The object is not the luxury. The experience is.

Encourt has taken that philosophy and applied it to sport.

Even the gym makes the point. It is tempting for sports clubs to treat fitness facilities as a box that needs ticking, but the reality is that the serious player increasingly understands that what happens away from the court is fundamental to what happens on it. Strength, mobility, conditioning and recovery are no longer separate concepts for somebody who wants to become a better athlete. Encourt's gym sits alongside a reformer Pilates studio and recovery facilities including a sauna, steam room, jacuzzi and cold plunge, meaning that the club's proposition extends well beyond the ninety minutes of padel for which you originally arrived.

And this is perhaps where the timing of Encourt becomes particularly interesting.

The British padel market is entering a different stage of its development. The LTA's original strategy was focused heavily on visibility, participation and infrastructure: get people interested, get them playing and build enough courts to accommodate them. Those objectives have been achieved at extraordinary speed. The organisation's latest data now describes Britain as having entered a more mature phase, in which the conversation is beginning to shift towards coaching, competition, quality of facilities and the long-term sustainability of the sport.

That maturation inevitably creates tiers.

There will always be the local court you book because it is five minutes from home. There will be large commercial centres designed around volume and accessibility. There will be community facilities, which are essential if the sport is going to continue growing in a way that is genuinely inclusive. But alongside them, there is now room for something else: clubs that are destinations in their own right, where the quality of the experience becomes part of the reason you play.

Encourt is the clearest example I have encountered in Britain of that final category.

What makes it interesting is that it doesn't feel as though somebody simply decided to make a padel club more expensive. Instead, the entire proposition seems to have been considered from the perspective of what happens before, during and after the match. You arrive, you change, you warm up, you play, you recover, you eat, you talk, perhaps you work for a while, and then you realise that there was never really any reason to leave immediately after your booking. The experience has been designed around the idea that sport can occupy more of your day without becoming an inconvenience.

That is a very different philosophy from simply putting better courts into a warehouse.

And perhaps that is why my conversations with Aman about Encourt have stayed with me. Knowing the person behind a project changes the way you see the building itself, because you begin to understand that the details are expressions of a belief about what the sport should become. Aman isn't simply building another place for people to hit a ball over a net. The ambition is much broader: to create somewhere that treats the player with the same consideration that the world's best hospitality businesses treat their guests.

Whether you are an aspiring professional, an obsessive amateur like me, somebody who has picked up a racket for the first time or someone who has simply come along because a friend asked you to play, that philosophy makes a difference.

It also raises an interesting question about where padel goes next.

The sport cannot, and should not, become entirely about luxury. One of the things that makes its growth so exciting is its accessibility, and there is an important distinction between creating exceptional premium environments and allowing the sport to become inaccessible. Britain needs community courts, affordable facilities, junior programmes and places where someone can discover padel without knowing what a premium racket costs or understanding the difference between a vibora and a bandeja. The extraordinary growth of the sport will only remain meaningful if that accessibility is protected.

But accessibility and excellence do not have to be opposites.

There can be a place for both.

What Encourt has demonstrated is that there is also a place for ambition, and I suspect that this is where the next chapter of British padel becomes particularly interesting. Once you have more than a million people playing the sport and more than 1,800 courts across the country, simply adding another court is no longer enough to differentiate a club. The question becomes what you build around it, how you make people feel when they arrive and whether you give them a reason to return beyond the fact that they have another match booked.

That is why I don't really think of Encourt as a particularly luxurious padel club, at least not in the conventional sense of the word.

I think it is something more significant.

It is an attempt to redefine what a padel club can be.

For the past couple of years, I have been searching for marginal gains in my own game: the racket that gives me a little more control, the shoes that give me a little more confidence moving across the court, the coaching insight that makes one particular shot suddenly make sense. I have become increasingly convinced that progress in sport comes from these small details, from accumulating enough of them that eventually they change the way you perform.

Perhaps places are the same.

A towel waiting for you is a small detail. So is a clean changing room, a genuinely good coffee, a thoughtful gym, a beautiful court, somewhere comfortable to sit after a match, or a recovery space that makes you want to stay another thirty minutes. None of these things will make you a better padel player on their own, but together they alter the context in which you play, and that context changes how you experience the sport.

Standing at Encourt with Aman, looking across those terracotta and Wimbledon-green courts, I found myself thinking less about whether this was the nicest padel club I had visited and more about whether the definition of a padel club had simply changed.

I think it has.

For years, the British padel industry has been engaged in a race to build courts. Now, with participation having passed one million and infrastructure expanding at a remarkable pace, the more interesting race is beginning: who can create the places that people actually want to inhabit?

Encourt has got there early.

It has understood that luxury is not a chandelier, a logo or a membership price, and it certainly isn't simply a synonym for expensive. Luxury is consideration. It is the feeling that somebody has thought carefully about the journey you are about to take and removed the little inconveniences before you have even encountered them. It is the reason a five-star hotel can make you feel looked after without ever making you feel managed.

That is precisely what Encourt has brought to padel.

And perhaps the most revealing thing is how quickly it changes your expectations. Once you have played somewhere where the court is immaculate, the towels are waiting, the water is there, the gym feels genuinely premium, the recovery facilities are integrated into the experience, the restaurant feels like part of the club rather than an afterthought and the whole place has been designed with a coherent sense of purpose, it becomes rather difficult to return to a club where none of those things have been considered.

The benchmark has moved, and that is ultimately what I think Encourt represents.

Not the end point of luxury padel, but the beginning of a new expectation for it.

Padel has spent the last decade proving that Britain wants to play.

The next decade may be about showing Britain how good playing can feel.